Lena Finkle’s magic arc: hybrid influences in the Russian American graphic novel

ABSTRACT

The article examines Anya Ulinich’s graphic narrative Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel and the novel’s use of visual culture from both the author’s Russian and US American backgrounds. The article interrogates the use of history and timelines, Russian art history and Russian art education in Ulinich’s text. It also analyzes other literary constructs that influenced Ulinich’s novel: US American comics/graphic novels and their use of stereotype, and novels by Russian-speaking Jewish American writers, with their thematized Jewishness.     

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

Contemporary sociology of literature is predominantly shaped by the research of literary production, which approaches literary works as black boxes and subordinates them to social interactions and institutions. Even sociologists who recognize usefulness of literature for its inner quality often look at literary texts as mere passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. In proposing a new sociology of literature, I first briefly outline the history of sociological studies of literature; second, I introduce “the state of the art” in the sociology of literature; third, I explore the relationship between sociology and literature in more general terms; and lastly, I discuss approaches and ideas with the potential to become components of a new research program, which would be a powerful alternative to the mainstream paradigms in sociological studies of literature. Such a program would make it clear that sociology can greatly benefit from cooperation with literature when sociologists are sensitive to the subtleties and (especially aesthetic) specificities of literary works.     

Between Literary and Subliterary Paradigms: Skaz and Contemporary Russian Estrada Comedy

The present article contends that literary skaz has significantly influenced the narrative framework of contemporary Russian estrada comedy. Skaz’s “theatricality,” “orality,” ambiguous authorship, spontaneity, and “folksiness” have the potential to add a rich, conversation-like complexity to the generally non-improvisational Russian comedy performance. Skaz’s allocutional projection of the audience into a comedian’s performance also creates an illusion of mutual communication between performer and public. While relying on Bakhtin’s treatment of skazas a double-voiced narrative, I argue that skaz allows the comedian to deliver sharp social commentary through a provincial or uneducated persona. Of particular interest for this study is the practical motivation for Russian comedians to resort to the mask of skaz narrators in the 1990s, an era of seemingly open public discourse. I argue that the continuing appropriation of a written, literary text (skaz) by an oral, popular performance (estrada comedy) suggests the versatility of the literary form, while simultaneously testifying to the on-going health of the written and spoken word in contemporary Russia.     

Plagiarism or Russian Symbolist Intertextuality? Hawthorne's 'the Snow Image' and Sologub's 'snegurochka'

Abstract

In early 1909, the Russian symbolist Fedor Sologub was accused of plagiarizing his short story 'Snegurochka' from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Snow Image'. For several months this case and others were discussed in the Russian press. A comparison of the two texts reveals that, while the plots are almost identical, Sologub's text contains a host of alterations that make it a truly 'Symbolist' work and, given the context in which it was created, make a charge of plagiarism difficult to prove.

For several centuries the concept of 'plagiarism' has been debated; many great authors — including several who influenced Sologub — have been accused of it, yet no definitive definition of his 'literary crime' has been reached. The Russian Symbolists were among the many who rejected traditional notions of originality; they instead actively engaged the literary past in various ways. Sologub perhaps was more active than most and made daring use of others' texts a cornerstone of his carefully crafted literary persona. While determining 'guilt' is most likely impossible, this episode does reveal much about Sologub and his literary methods.     

Setting the record straight: Tsvangirai’s memoir At the Deep End as a rival narrative

In this paper, an argument is put forward that through literary and political patronage Morgan Tsvangirai constructed a life narrative that is meant to challenge the ZANU-PF hegemonic discourse of demonisation that presents and depicts him as a political puppet to the British whose agenda is to effect regime change in Zimbabwe. He thus makes use of the book as a political and literary tool to set the record straight. It is further argued that different narrative strategies such as modesty topos, blended voices and historical archiving are used to position Tsvangirai as a political messiah in Zimbabwe, whose involvement in politics was not by accident but a fulfilment of his destiny, cause and calling. Therefore, memoir writing is seen more as an act of defiance and personal archiving for political gain than an interest in one’s personal history. Personal history is instead made to replace national history. The self is the nation and his story is the story of the nation.     

Self-Affirmation through Death: A Contribution to the Sociology of Suicide through Literature

This study contributes to the sociological study of suicide via an exploration of the implications and application of literary texts in sociological analysis. The examination of two pairs of literary texts suggests that some cases of suicide can be self-affirming. When the characters find themselves in circumstances that threaten their perception of who they are in their social contexts, they may choose the possibility of death over life with a change in self-concept. The interpretation of the four selected narrative cases of self-affirmative suicide is nestled in complexities of self-identity: two from The Iliad by Homer, and one each from Andorra and I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch. Relating the findings to Turner's theory of impulsive versus institutional loci of real self, the article argues that institutionally constituted characters are more likely than impulsive-selves to find self-killing an acceptable resolution to their crises of identity. The findings are discussed in relation to classic theory in the sociology of suicide, concepts of the real self, and the use of literature in social science research.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

Botswana Expansive School Transformation Project (BeST): A Response to Serpell’s Commentary

Those who are acquainted with Vygotsky's theory probably know that his publications were blacklisted in the Soviet Union from 1936 until 1956. Regrettably though, only a few adherents of Vygotsky in the West are informed about the great pains taken by the Russian Vygotskians to get hold of a firm position in the local psychological landscape between 1956 and the origin of the perestroika at the end of the 1990s. With this in mind, we here present Vasilii Davydov's vivid account of an endeavor to organize an open conference on Vygotsky's theory at the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1981. Ultimately, the Communist Party officials prohibited this conference. The story involved is actually an excerpt from an unedited audiotaped interview I had with Davydov in my residence on June 13, 1994. Davydov spoke in a flawless, sparkling Russian. Therefore, it was a great challenge to translate his narrative adequately. Elina Lampert-Shepel and I have done our best to render the subtleties that reverberate in Davydov's account of the event concerned.     

Revivifying Russia: Literature,Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

Abstract

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.     

Missing Ralph Keeler: Bohemians,Brahmins and Literary Friendships in the Gilded Age

Abstract

Though almost entirely forgotten, Ralph Keeler (1840–1873) occupies a unique position in American literary history. In the decade after the Civil War, he achieved fame as an essayist and travel writer. Navigating between the literary poles of San Francisco and Boston at crucial moments, he developed significant friendships with luminaries like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. But while those men were experiencing the transitions of marriage, fatherhood and domestic responsibility, Keeler remained a self-styled vagabond. He consciously crafted a distinctive reputation as a Bohemian bachelor, opposed to bourgeois respectability. This article argues that the rediscovery of Keeler’s lost trajectory through these personal and professional relationships changes our sense of the development of American literature in the postbellum period. In particular, Keeler serves as a point of comparison that complicates our understanding of the life, work and self-conception of canonical figures like Twain and Howells.     

An Early Investigation of the Dezhnev Expedition of 1648-49

In Russian, the statistically dominant order of the subject and the verb in the clause is SV. However, there are many environments in which VS orders also occur, not all of which have been noted in the scholarly literature. This paper outlines some models of Russian constituent order that have been put forward in both generative and functional frameworks, and it suggests how they may be modified to improve their adequacy. Its central claim is that an improved model of Russian clause organization would take the form (VS)Theme/(VS)Rheme. It offers analyses of a large set of data collected from literary and academic writing in support of its claim, in so doing presenting a more or less comprehensive overview of environments in which clauses containing post-verbal subjects are found in written Russian.     

Living On Tortoise Time: Alternative Travel as the Pursuit of Lifestyle

This article is an enthnographic account of an alternative bus tour through the American Southwest with the Green Tortoise travel company. In a narrative reconstruction which integrates participant-observation fieldnotes and recollections from other tour participants, I describe and analyze how a leisure journey provides a context for experimenting with alternative forms of social organization. As a mode of alternative travel, the Green Tortoise tour self-consciously situates itself in opposition to the organizing structures typically associated with more conventional forms of mass tourism. The tour described here is modeled on an idealized image of community that emphasizes a notion of resistance to mass tourism through performance, symbol, and spectacle, and centers around the pursuit of lifestyle and identity.     

Images of Jewish identities in Lithuanian literature of the twentieth century: Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris

This paper deals with the identity concept of two Lithuanian Jewish writers, Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris. Kanovich, as a member of the Holocaust generation, writing in Russian, depicts his protagonists as spiritual and hardworking people with strong self‐confidence, resting on religion and custom. By means of the narrative technique of memory, Kanovich creates a literary resurrection of the Lithuanian Jews as a people which was almost completely exterminated during the Holocaust. Omnipresent pictures of cemetery and grave transform the Lithuanian space into a metonymy of death and, grotesquely, to the only place of home, being the “shelter” for the killed bodies of the Lithuanian Jewry. Markas Zingeris, growing up in post‐war Soviet Lithuania, represents the concept of open identities, changeable in time and place. Calling himself a Lithuanian writer who has been raised within a Lithuanian, Jewish, and, not least, Soviet milieu, Zingeris depicts his protagonists in in‐between situations. Writing in Lithuanian, speaking several languages fluently and working as translator, Zingeris embodies the cosmopolite. At the same time, though, he is a writer of collective memory. He comments on the apparent loss of the great utopia of an autonomous identity with ironic melancholy, pointing instead to the rich variety of hybrid identities.     

Phototextuality: photography,fiction, criticism

Ever since the advent of the medium in the mid-nineteenth century, photography and literature have been involved in an almost constant dialogue and process of intersemiotic cross-fertilisation. The scholarly field that has recently begun to develop around the critical study of this kind of aesthetic border crossing – what will here be called ‘phototextuality’ – is as burgeoning as it is multidisciplinary, spanning over 150 years of literary, artistic, and cultural history. In this article – conceived as a ‘state of the art’ of contemporary phototextual practice – the author proposes to clarify our understanding of what a phototext is and does by focusing on three particular manifestations of the trend: namely, narrative photographs, photographically engaged fictions and a particularly stunning work of critical inquiry that embodies, as much as it examines, the image–text paradigm.     

The self in the other: Aleksandr Griboedov’s Orient

While scholars of Russian orientalism have diverged somewhat in their interpretation of Aleksandr Griboedov, they have in the main viewed him as a supporter of Russian expansion and seen in his works a justification of Russia’s conquests in the East. This essay seeks to complicate that view. By taking a comprehensive look at Griboedov’s Eastern-themed works (including his poems “There, Where Flows the Alazani”, “Kal'ianchi”, and “Predators on the Chegem”, the play Georgian Night and a series of editorials, letters, and travel notes written from the Caucasus and Persia) and situating them in the context of contemporary literary and political debates, the author argues that Griboedov undercuts rather than supports the orientalist conception of the East’s alterity. By portraying “Eastern” ways as possibilities latent within all humans and by pointing out the Russian past in the Persian present, Griboedov is able to question Russia’s role in the Caucasus and to explore the costs of Russia’s progress towards European-style civilization.     

Reflections on “the looking glass war” photography,espionage and the cold war

The article focuses on a syndicated newspaper photograph which was used in 1996 to illustrate an espionage story involving British and Russian diplomats. The photograph appeared on the front pages of two British newspapers. Following an exploration of the formal aspects of the photograph, the paper explores the different editorial agendas of the two newspapers. This leads to a questioning of the documentary value of the image as well as its broader historical, political and literary setting. It not only shows how the photograph alludes to the spy thriller, but the structure of article itself draws upon and aims to mimic this literary genre.     

The post-Soviet “Orient” in stories by Vladimir Makanin and Liudmila Petrushevskaia

This article analyzes a paradoxical feature in post-Soviet Russian literature and film, where an anti-imperial message coexists with colonial tropes. It focuses on two short stories: “Slabye kosti” (“Weak Bones,” 1988) by Liudmila Petrushevskaia and “Kavkazskii plennyi” (“Prisoner of the Caucasus,” 1995) by Vladimir Makanin. Set respectively in Central Asia and the Caucasus, these stories reflect on the troubled Russian and Soviet relationship with these regions. Despite their artistic complexity and anti-imperial messages, these works are trapped by the literary tropes and cultural stereotypes of the past. These stories relate to a broader cultural trend characteristic of post-Soviet Russian culture. On the one hand, Russian culture has remained unreceptive to post-colonial discourses adopted by Western intellectuals. On the other hand, the resurgence of imperial preoccupations in contemporary Russia, as well as the anxiety surrounding Russia’s territorial integrity, preclude the development of Russia’s own discourses on ethnically distinct peripheries and identities. As a result of this discursive silence, even nuanced writers, such as Makanin and Petrushevskaia, rely on the traditional models of representing the Caucasus and Central Asia.     

A literature review of overnight work travel within individual,family and social contexts

ABSTRACT

This paper presents results of a comprehensive literature review of empirical studies investigating travel for work and how it relates to individual lives. The paper presents information on how work travel has been operationalized in the literature. The paper describes findings concerning how feelings about travel, individual well-being, the work/family interface, family relationships and social connections have been found to be affected by work travel. The empirical articles on workers who travel have been conducted in multiple countries and via diverse methodologies, which provides richness to the findings. The lack of uniformity in how work travel has been operationalized presents challenges for drawing conclusions about the effects of work travel. Recommendations concerning how to move the field forward are presented, including uniting the employment-related literature with the family literature to provide more holistic and useful implications for the study of work travel.